50 States, 1 Rallying Cry: Get Off Aid and Get a Job

Its aim was to end “welfare as we know it” and replace it with a crazy quilt of innovation stretching, state by state, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Federal welfare reform, a year after its enactment on Aug. 22, 1996, has done just that. As states scramble to craft smaller, more selective safety nets for their poor in accordance with the new law, they have set off a nationwide frenzy of invention.

The width and breadth of the 50-state effort is indeed striking. The Clinton administration announced last week that caseloads plunged by 1.4 million during the nine months following enactment of the federal law, bringing the nation’s welfare population to a 27-year low.

“The impact of the federal bill was absolutely huge,” says Con Hogan, director of Vermont’s Department of Social Welfare and a leading voice in the national reform effort. “There is an awesome sense of creativity and energy across the country. And it’s brought new energy and purpose to our work.”

Yet what is more remarkable, perhaps, is the harmonious look of the resulting patchwork. At the conclusion of Year One of national welfare reform, two common threads bring unity--if not uniformity--to the emerging pattern of state plans.

One of those threads is work--the key word in the law’s formal title, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. The second is the notion that public aid is temporary--underscored by the name of the new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, created by the legislation.

A Coast-to-Coast Refrain: Get a Job

As a result, the message heard today by those on public aid is virtually the same in the sprawling slums of Oakland as it is in the wooded hollers of Kentucky: The helping hand of government assistance will no longer be extended without limit. The public’s munificence is finite. So get a job.

Now, reluctant late-comers to reform like Louisiana, Kentucky and Alaska are sending their poor and unemployed the same message as are Wisconsin, Oregon and Michigan, the nation’s undisputed pioneers in the field.

As messages go, it’s powerful stuff. But a year into the task of carrying out the federal law, states are discovering its limitations, too: The new message can hustle a lot of people off the welfare rolls, but it can’t keep them off. And it won’t come close to nudging them all into the work force.

Those are the challenges facing states at the dawn of Year Two.

“We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit--the people who were more job-ready,” says Gary Weeks, who as director of Oregon’s Adult and Family Services Department has presided over a stunning 43% decline in his state’s welfare rolls over the last three years.

“The people who remain on the rolls may be involved with domestic violence, may have mental health issues or learning disabilities, and may have a history of chronic, chronic unemployment,” Weeks says. “We still believe there are opportunities to place these people in jobs, but you have to be willing to spend enough.”

With such challenges in mind, the authors of last year’s law gave states broad freedom to figure out how to send the message, whom to focus on first and how to make it stick. In crafting their plans, governors and lawmakers are making full use of their new freedom.

But even as strategies diverge and programs proliferate, aid recipients are being bombarded with the common themes of welfare reform.

* In Oklahoma, Mississippi and Minnesota--states with radically different approaches to putting people to work--recipients opening their welfare checks are receiving eye-catching inserts: Bluntly worded warnings, superimposed in some cases on images of ticking clocks, tell recipients they should begin counting off the days until their benefits end, and find work.

* In Milwaukee, welfare offices are now called job centers, and new applicants for benefits are ushered directly to a bank of computers with employment listings. In Detroit, job counselors working under contract to the state lead motivational cheers at the start of each job-search session, and answer their phones by declaring, “What a difference a job makes!”

* Recipients in several California counties get the same message when they call their “employment counselors” (nee caseworkers) and are routed to their voice mail in-boxes. In cheerful tones, counselors invite callers to leave a message, adding that they hope there is good news about a job.

Not Aid-Seekers, but Job-Seekers

Throughout the country, welfare offices are trying to change the subtle message they convey to applicants and recipients. Caseworkers greet clients with firm handshakes rather than a harried wave at a nearby chair. Computers are repositioned and chairs placed across the desk rather than pulled up to the side, letting clients know they are no longer petitioners for public aid, but job-seekers. Downtrodden “Dilbert” cartoons are making way for motivational posters.

“In our book, message and culture are 80% of the issue. It’s huge,” says Dean Curtis, who heads Curtis & Associates, a welfare-to-work placement firm active in more than half the states. “People on assistance are job-seekers needing some help, not poor people forced to get jobs. We’ve got to rethink how we see the client, and it’s more than just posters. It’s the consistent message they hear when they first walk through the door.”

To be sure, many leading examples of the new approach were devised well before passage of last year’s federal law. Even before August 1996, all but a handful of states were experimenting with welfare changes under special permission from Washington. With such “demonstration projects” underway in 43 states, the landscape of welfare already had begun a process of fitful change.

But with passage of the federal law, that transformation gained unstoppable momentum and a single set of governing principles.

“You can’t change culture with demonstration projects,” observes Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. If those dependent on federal aid, or at risk of becoming so, are to believe that times have changed, she says, “everybody around them has to play by the same rules.”

Before enactment of the federal law, as the welfare debate gathered steam and states began experimenting with reforms, the new message helped drive caseloads down by 2.3 million people, from a peak of 14.4 million in March 1994 to 12.1 million when President Clinton signed the bill.

The pace picked up sharply during the nine months following enactment, with 1.4 million more people dropping off the rolls by May 1997, the latest date for which figures are available. The current population of 10.7 million is the lowest since 1970.

All told, for every four welfare recipients who were collecting aid in early 1994, only three remain on the rolls today.

(The decline has been less dramatic in California, where the economic recovery arrived late and reform legislation became mired in politics. The state’s welfare population dipped from a record 2.7 million in March 1995 to 2.4 million in May 1997, according to the Clinton administration.)

While a brisk economy is generally considered the most important cause of the decline, Clinton’s senior circle of economists reckons that changes in state welfare policies--and in the message directed at recipients--account for roughly a third of the departures.

And that message has begun to trickle down to recipients.

“There is a general perception that the future of welfare is more uncertain, that the rules have changed,” says Dan Bloom of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., a firm that has conducted extensive interviews with welfare recipients to gauge the impact of new programs.

When Mississippi caseworkers started telling new applicants they would have to work immediately to continue receiving benefits, one in three never came back. In Wisconsin, half of new applicants walked out and never returned. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of recipients with other sources of income or reasonably good job prospects forsook the welfare system and simply melted from the rolls.

But the rate of decline is expected to slow, and states will soon come face to face with the limitations of message. A stern admonition to get a job--paired with a strong economy--may scare the most employable off the rolls. But it will take much more than that--more effort, more risk, more money--to pry most of the remaining three in four from their dependence on public aid.

Financial Incentives Offered Employers

Even with the national economy humming along at 4.8% unemployment, states face substantial challenges in getting employers to hire welfare recipients. Most are dealing with employer reluctance the old-fashioned way: by offering financial inducements.

For example, Massachusetts, Oregon and Mississippi, all early entries in the welfare-reform effort, are providing wage subsidies to help employers offset for six to nine months the cost of hiring and training welfare recipients.

Beyond the immediate challenge of putting disadvantaged job-seekers to work is the even greater challenge of keeping them there.

Before enactment of the federal law, roughly 70% of recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children--the centerpiece of the old welfare system--could be counted on to give up welfare payments within two years. But about half eventually came back.

In addition, about half of all adult AFDC recipients, cycling on and off the rolls, have accumulated more than five years on welfare.

Under the new law, federal funds may not be used to keep an adult recipient on aid for more than five years in her lifetime, and the bill allows states to adopt even tougher time limits. As states launch or refine their programs in line with the new federal limits, many experts and administrators say their greatest long-term challenge is halting the cycle of off-again, on-again dependence.

“Time limits really raise the stakes,” says David Butler, a senior welfare reform analyst with Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. “Before, if you didn’t achieve self-sufficiency, you could always come back to welfare. So now, the issue of what do you do to keep people off of welfare becomes much more fundamental.”

For many states, the task of designing programs that put people to work quickly has been challenge enough. Others, however, are aiming to build job retention into their plans from the outset.

At least 12 states, including California, have agreed to extend health and child-care benefits to former welfare recipients well beyond the minimum 12 months required by federal law. Minnesota, in fact, allows former recipients to continue to receive subsidized benefits as long as they remain below the poverty level.

Making all of this work, say those involved in the task, demands major cultural changes, not only on the part of welfare recipients but also on the part of caseworkers. It is not, by all accounts, an easy transition.

“The hardest part for us is not the recipients themselves. It’s been the welfare workers,” says Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland, an early reform champion whose complaints echo those of many other state officials. “The only remaining problem has been the small sector of people who just want to continue to give out checks and keep people dependent. They’re still there, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy. It’s job preservation, a natural human response.”

In some cases, states are trying the same carrot-and-stick approaches with caseworkers as they employ with recipients, rewarding them with bonuses for high performance and penalizing them if caseloads don’t decline.

Some states are bypassing some or all of their caseworkers by making broad use of private contractors, whose pay is tied to their success in placing recipients in jobs and, in some cases, getting them off the rolls. Texas has sought to privatize virtually all of its caseworker functions, drawing heated opposition both from the Clinton administration and organized labor. Vermont has struck long-term labor agreements that will ensure some job security even as caseworkers pare their rolls.

“At some level we have to make some of the same shift our clients do,” says Susan Christie, an official of the American Public Welfare Assn. who is running caseworker-re-education seminars across the country.

“The direct message--that what we’re about is work--is absolutely critical,” says Christie. “It drives all the other things we do. I don’t think we can over-message this.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Crazy Quilt of Welfare Reform

The challenge of getting welfare recipients to work has created a tapestry of initiatives so rich and varied that a cottage industry has sprung up to create and implement them, assess their success and market them for use in other states and localities. For every obstacle standing between a welfare recipient and work--and they are myriad--some state, county, city or nonprofit organization has devised a program to address it. Some examples:

****

HIRING

* Montana is working with banks to arrange no-interest loans for expanding businesses that hire welfare recipients.

* Rhode Island reduces the risks faced by employers by allowing them to use an outside organization, usually a nonprofit enterprise, as the employer of record.

* Nevada and its Chamber of Commerce have struck a deal with the gambling industry, setting aside 10% of all new hires for welfare recipients.

****

JOB RETENTION

* Mississippi’s human services department is working with churches and synagogues to get them to “adopt” welfare recipients and mentor them through the transition to work. Texas includes civic and business groups as well as churches in its mentor program.

* Oregon’s Jobs Plus Program requires subsidized employers to pay $1 per hour into an “individual educational account” that can be tapped after the welfare recipient obtains a permanent, unsubsidized job.

* Hawaii and several other states are focusing on welfare recipients’ “career progression” to ensure that entry-level positions do not turn into dead-end jobs.

****

ATTITUDE

* In Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, a nonprofit program called Strive teaches participants such skills as dressing appropriately, arriving on time, shaking hands firmly and coping with distasteful work assignments.

* In a number of states, the for-profit firm American Works gives welfare recipients a five-week course in workplace basics, provides ongoing counseling and serves for a time as the employer of record.

****

CHILD CARE

* Illinois has increased state dollars devoted to low-income child care by 96%, and promised to make subsidies available to all low-income residents, not just those getting off welfare.

* Kentucky and several other states are training welfare recipients to start day-care businesses in their homes.

* Rhode Island is springing for health insurance for child-care workers in an effort to help day-care centers get established, stay in business and attract better workers.

****

TRANSPORTATION

* Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee and St. Louis have established public transit routes to carry recipients from distressed central cities to suburban job sites.

* Rural states, such as Kentucky, are experimenting with programs that let welfare recipients lease cars, including old police cruisers, at low rates.

* Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and North Carolina have changed their eligibility standards so recipients may keep more reliable cars without losing benefits.